CHOW Foods 429 15th Avenue East Seattle, WA 98112 T: (206) 322-3421

Jeremy Hardy began his career as a dishwasher at the age of 14 in a diner south of Boston. After attending bartending school, he slowly worked his way up the ranks at TGIF, moving from state to state as new restaurants opened. While in Portland, Oregon, he met his future friend and business partner Peter Levy. In 1988, they made the leap of opening their own establishment, The Beeliner Diner, and founded CHOW Foods, their ‘neighborhood’ restaurant company. They now own and operate five successful restaurants in the Puget Sound area. Here, Jeremy Hardy shares their methods for starting and running a successful restaurant company.

Interview
You own restaurants with diverse concepts. How do you maintain quality across the board?

Maintaining quality is a huge challenge. It’s about training. Communicating passion, method, and concept. We are very involved. The only way to do it is with really great people. Our managers are fantastic (all of our general managers are women…). We have a thin executive management with Peter and me and an Executive Chef (Emily Mabus who started with us as a line cook in 1992), a controller and maintenance guy, and that’s it. I think that tightly knit environment helps to maintain a strong work culture.

How would you describe the methods of communication in your company?

We use email a lot. I meet with the General Manger twice a month for about one and a half hours at a time. There are also monthly meetings with each manager. The Executive Chef has bi-weekly meetings. We use Microsoft’s B-Central –it creates an intranet environment for posting reviews and doing payroll. We spent a lot of time putting together our roles and clarifying who communicates with whom.

What are the skills and behaviors needed for a strong team? How do you go about developing these skills and behaviors?

I look for a lack of cynicism. I don’t care what your background or skill level is. If you need to be the smartest person in the room, be overly competitive, I won’t hire you. Once you are hired, everyone gets a one-hour orientation about leadership, success, and accountability – everything we are looking for as a company. We need to be focused on a common horizon, and you get that through clear one-on-one communication, not a handbook. We build our team one relationship at a time. Not that we don’t have a profit motive, but you have to find a way for everyone to strive towards the same goal.

Seattle is a close-knit community. As a company based on the neighborhood restaurant model, what is your professional responsibility to maintain good community relationships?

We like to be perceived as leaders in the community. We want to be known, because if people don’t know, you they won’t trust you. In some ways, it’s easier to walk into a national chain because you know what you are going to get. We have to work harder to get people to trust that walking through our doors they’ll get the same.

What was the mindset behind the casual restaurant setting? Is it more appropriate for Seattle diners?

In the 1980s when we opened our first restaurant, there was a lot of low-end and high-end restaurants doing pretty pedestrian stuff. So we wanted to go after a different market, one that mirrored our lives. We look at the restaurants as self-portraits, or songs that we both work on. The focus for us at the beginning was comfortable, kid-friendly dining, because that’s who we were. We saw a big opportunity in the casual dining market.

What is the process a restaurant takes from conceptualization to opening the doors?

It’s one of exploration. We don’t do the same concept in every case. We find a location or building we like – usually older, with character. The biggest billboard you have is your building. Then we look at demographics, and then it begins to take shape. It’s like downloading a picture on a slow computer. It starts fuzzy, and as it becomes clearer, when you can feel and smell and taste it, then you know you’ve got it. We also get to know the neighborhood by going to Chamber of Commerce meetings. Then things like surfaces, style, service and uniform develop as we continue to write the project.

How do you decide the placement of each restaurant?

We look to see if it will cannibalize any of our existing restaurants. If it will, we switch concepts. There is no real guide – sometime a high density population is great for a concept, sometimes it isn’t. But we need enough people to support each project.